The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  A flutter of motion from the car registered in his eye-corner. Packer was beckoning. David hurried down to him.

  “What’s all this about?” demanded the white man. “You having trouble?”

  David told him, briefly. Packer frowned. “You think Stone Wolf did it? After all, he’s my step-granddad.”

  “I believe him when he says he doesn’t know how it happened,” replied David, “and it’s plain that nobody else could have got to Yellow Bird. The set-up’s like those sealed-room killings in the mystery stories. The police college instructors used to joke about them.”

  “It’s no joke when the story’s true,” said Packer weightily. “Well, what next? If Stone Wolf goes to jail—” He stopped, with his mouth half open, and his face lighted up. “Look,” he said, more animatedly, “if his memory lapsed, he can’t be tried for murder. He’s mentally incompetent.”

  “At Stone Wolf’s age he’d probably beat a conviction on those grounds,” agreed David.

  “I certainly hope so,” said Packer earnestly. “I’d do anything for that old duck. I’m the closest to a family he’s got left. Maybe—”

  “Tell me later.” Again David was scrambling up the slope. He rounded the cabin again, entered the back door, and dropped the bar in place. Once more he paced around Yellow Bird’s motionless body, thoughtful and silent.

  He could see now that a knife-throw from outside was impossible. The position of the hilt showed that the blade had gone in, not flat down but edge down. Not even a circus star could have counted on sailing it through the narrow space beneath the window in that fashion. David produced his bandana, knelt, and with his cloth-wrapped hand tugged at the bloody hilt. It was wedged hard, in spine or rib.

  He got up quickly and went back into the front room. Stone Wolf sat motionless on the floor. David felt elation mingling with the gravity of his mood. He was being a policeman after all, finding out many small things that fitted together into a picture of growing clarity. He asked:

  “Stone Wolf, when did you last see Yellow Bird alive?”

  “This morning.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “Since our quarrel I kept to this room, he to the kitchen. Men who call each other thief and liar do not speak until the question is properly settled.”

  “Yuh,” agreed David. “That is good Tsichah custom. And then?”

  “We cooked at different times. I came this morning to fry bacon on the kitchen stove. When Yellow Bird saw me he unbarred the back door and went out. He looked at me without speaking.” Stone Wolf’s eyes fluttered briefly in their bracketing of pouchy wrinkles. “I think he was like me, anxious for a settlement. I cooked but I ate only a little, for my stomach was sad in me. When I came back in here, Yellow Bird came into the kitchen. He barred the door again and closed the door to this room. I heard him sit down and wait.”

  “When did you leave this room again?”

  “When the sun was high. I felt hungry, for I had eaten so little in the morning. I opened the door to the kitchen and I saw that I had killed my brother.”

  Stone Wolf’s hand, again emerging, rubbed its fingertips together as if casting away a pinch of sand—the sign of loss. David looked at him with eyes that brightened.

  “You can kill with a knife? Show me.”

  Slowly Stone Wolf got to his feet and took the knife that David held out, hilt foremost. David picked up the ruined old chair. “Stab here,” he directed. “I am a chief. Do not ask questions about what I want. Obey me.”

  Stone Wolf gripped the knife, his hand knowledgeable upon it. He struck with considerable suddenness for an old man. David lifted the chair by its shaky legs, catching the driving point on the wooden seat.

  “That was a weak stab, uncle,” he taunted. “Again.”

  Stone Wolf stepped closer and struck, with all his force. David caught the point as before, then tilted the chair to see. He curled his lip scornfully as he studied the splintery little nick.

  “I have not your young arm,” reminded Stone Wolf. “Once my blow would have split that chair, or even a heavier thing.”

  “Take the knife in both your hands,” bade David. He set the chair upright and steadied it by the back. “With all your strength this time. Strike down.”

  Stone Wolf’s left hand cupped around and over his right, gripping the knife daggerwise. He poised himself, summoning and tensing every fiber of his stringy muscles, then drove downward from shoulder height, and stepped back. The blade stood upright and vibrating, its point lodged in the seat of the chair.

  Stooping, David dislodged the knife with a little shake. He slid it back into the sheath at his hip. His white teeth flashed through the gloom of the curtained cabin in a happy smile.

  “You did not kill your brother, Stone Wolf.”

  The gray head shook, its two braids quivered on Stone Wolf’s shoulders. “But I have shown that I did.”

  “I say you did not,” insisted David. “A stronger hand than yours struck Yellow Bird. The blow drove your knife through bone and flesh. You could never have done it.”

  Again Stone Wolf’s hand made the quivering mystery-sign. “I see the truth of that. Your wisdom is big.”

  “You must help me.” David seized the scrawny old shoulder in his earnestness. “Someone else killed Yellow Bird. Who?”

  “A djiba? A devil?”

  “No squaw’s tales here! A man did it, somebody strong and bad. We will find him, you and I. First,” and he used an English word, “we must search for a—motive.”

  Stone Wolf was as baffled as David. “I am a child in these things. I do not know your meaning.”

  “A motive means, why did the man kill him?”

  “Why does any man kill another?” rejoined Stone Wolf. “He hates the other. He wants the other man’s horse or wife or weapons. He is afraid the other means to kill him, and strikes first.”

  “But who hated Yellow Bird? Not even you, though you had quarrelled. Yellow Bird had no wife or horse or other things. Even the little money itself was already stolen. And who would fear him?”

  “Those things are for a chief to find out.” Stone Wolf doddered over to the corner where odds and ends were piled. He fumbled in a worn buckskin pouch, cradled something in his palm, and from the water jug carefully sluiced a few drops upon it.

  “Nobody but you could have stabbed Yellow Bird inside this cabin,” David amplified, as much for himself as for Stone Wolf. “It was someone else—at the window. But he did not throw. He struck.” Breaking off, David watched his companion. “What are you doing there?”

  “This is red paint for mourning.” The old fellow dipped from the wet mass in his palm and smeared broad patches on his wrinkled cheeks, his parchment brow. Even in the dim room, the color was vivid.

  Almost leaping at Stone Wolf, David thrust his own thumb into the palmful of watered powder. “Vermilion,” said David at once. “Where did you get this?”

  Stone Wolf jerked his chin doorward. “Out there, near where the grass is growing. My father and my father’s father got red paint-powder in that place, long before white men ever came here.”

  “Red paint-powder,” echoed David. He studied his stained thumb as if it were writing he had just learned to read.

  “I mourn,” continued Stone Wolf, “for my brother. He did not die by my hand. I may honestly show sorrow.”

  “And I,” said David Return, “may honestly show the man who killed him.”

  He hastened outside.

  For a moment only he paused, under the kitchen window, to snatch at the woodpile. As he headed downslope to the car, Avery Packer rose from the running board.

  “Ready to bring Stone Wolf along?” asked the white man.

  “I’m ready to bring you along,” said David Return.

  He held out the three broken lengths of the bamboo.

  “When these were all in one piece,” he said, “they made a pole. Here, in the hollow butt end, you put that knife you’d stolen from Stone Wol
f. Through the crack of the window you jabbed at Yellow Bird’s back—hard. The knife stuck in his bones, and you pulled the pole free and broke it up to lose in the kindling pile.”

  Packer stared. He fumbled out tobacco-bag and papers. “I don’t get you,” he said, and for the first time he sounded foolish.

  “But I get you,” David assured him. “Stone Wolf’s innocent. That leaves you. You were the only one in contact with the brothers. You knew where they kept their money, how the cabin was arranged, you were able to steal Stone Wolf’s knife. You took the money to make them suspicious of each other and start quarrelling—you even carried a message for them to my grandfather. Then you hurried back and killed Yellow Bird. For this.”

  Tucking the pieces of bamboo under one arm, David thrust his other hand under Packer’s nose, waggling the red-smeared thumb.

  “That’s only Indian paint,” said Packer, his eyes goggling.

  “You recognize it. We both know what it is. Cinnabar—vermilion. For centuries the Tsichah and other Indians made their brightest red from it. But white men make something else—mercury. A deposit’s worth a fortune to the right developer.”

  Packer had started to roll a cigarette. He threw the paper and the pinch of tobacco grains on the ground. Again he opened his mouth, but this time no words came out.

  “You discovered the cinnabar deposit when you were dredging your pond,” went on David. “Your rent for the farming rights was low; but mineral rights would come high. It would be cheaper, you decided, to get them by killing.”

  “You’re crazy!” Packer exploded. “Yellow Bird was killed. I can’t claim anything of his. It’s Stone Wolf who’s my kin.”

  “And he’s alive,” David wound up for him. “You had that figured out, too. He’d stand trial, be called a crazy old man, and be put away in comfort—with a guardian named to handle his affairs. You’d be the logical one. You were all ready to offer yourself. You even started to explain all that to me, a moment ago when I was out here looking at the window and the woodpile. You sounded very kind and dutiful. Yellow Bird dead, Stone Wolf in a hospital or asylum—and you with a free hand to coin all that cinnabar into money.”

  David turned to the car, tossing in one piece of bamboo, then another. His right hip was within the white man’s reach.

  Packer shot out his own hand, whipping the knife from David’s belt.

  With the thickest piece of bamboo still in his hand, David struck Packer calculatingly across the knuckles. Packer swore in pain, and the knife dropped among the crumbs of spilled tobacco.

  “I gave you that chance on purpose, and you practically confessed,” announced David in tones sweet with triumph. “You knew I had you, so you were going to knife me as you knifed Yellow Bird.”

  Stooping swiftly, he caught up the knife. It gleamed authoritatively, point toward Packer.

  “Come to the agency with me,” commanded David Return.

  THE GLASS GRAVESTONE

  IT SHOULD BE NO SURPRISE that as one of the masters of the locked-room mystery, Joseph Commings (1913–1992) enjoyed the friendship of Edward D. Hoch, one of the greatest and most prolific writers in that challenging sub-genre, and Robert Adey, one of the foremost experts of detective fiction generally and impossible crimes specifically. Born in New York City, Commings lived there most of his life and met Hoch when the latter was stationed there for his army service in 1952 and 1953. They began a weekly correspondence that lasted until Commings had a stroke in 1971 and then continued sporadically until his death.

  Senator Brooks U. Banner, the giant (63, 270-pound) accomplished magician and adventurer, was his series character, born from when Commings made up stories to entertain his fellow soldiers in Sardinia during World War II. With some rewriting after the war, he found a ready market for them in the pulps 10-Story Detective and Ten Detective Aces (whose editor changed the character’s name to Mayor Tom Landin; when later reprinted, the name was changed back to Banner). Although the pulps were dying in the late 1940s, new digest-sized magazines came to life and Commings sold stories to Mystery Digest, The Saint Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Although he wrote several full-length mystery novels, none was published, in spite of the encouragement of his friend John Dickson Carr. The only Commings novels to see print were paperback original soft-core porn novels. The only book edition of his stories was published posthumously: Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2004).

  “The Glass Gravestone” was first published in the October 1966 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine. This is its first appearance in book form.

  JOSEPH COMMINGS

  THE MAN STANDING at the foot of the escalator, wearing the purple turban and the silver-tipped black beard, was Surendranath Das. He was a United Nations delegate from India. I walked toward him, the lobby floor under my feet all black and white marble, like a giant checkerboard.

  Das seemed to be hesitating. This was the down escalator from the mezzanine in the Secretariat. So he wasn’t thinking of taking it up. I hadn’t expected to see him. I hadn’t expected to see anybody except Sir Quiller Selwyn and Senator Banner. Like any other office building, The United Nations Secretariat closed up shop at six. It was now a dark nine p.m.

  At the rap of my heels, Das turned. He was a fat-bodied man with a handshake that was moist and flabby. Squinting across the deserted lobby through his glasses with the tortoise-shell rims, he placed me. His brindled beard parted in a grinning grimace. “How do you do?” He spoke in cultured English in a high piping voice. “You’re—ah—the newspaper reporter.”

  “Bob Farragut,” I said with a return grimace. “Associated Press.” There was a fine distinction and I wanted to keep it. I glanced upward toward the mezzanine with its subdued lights. “Mr. Das, have you seen Sir Quiller?”

  “Not yet. I was waiting for him. He sent for me.”

  “You?” I wanted to ask more, but there was no time.

  Sir Quiller Selwyn appeared at the top of the descending escalator. He was a squat bald-headed man with bushy eyebrows and a taciturn way. Even at this distance I could see a look on his face that I had never seen there before. It was a look of naked alarm.

  He didn’t seem to see me at all.

  “Das!” he cried. “Have you taken leave of your senses? They’re the most deadly—!” He put his feet on the moving steps. “Wait till I get down there!”

  Das and I were standing together. I glanced sideways at him to see how he was taking this severe admonition. Oddly, his coffee-colored face had turned toward me. His brown eyes looked sensitive and full of hurt.

  Yet his tone was calm. “I should like to ask you, Mr. Farragut, what you are doing here.”

  “I—”

  There was a sharp sound above us like a pistol shot.

  We both looked up at the escalator.

  Sir Quiller was now about halfway down, still over twenty feet away from us. I was shocked to see him beginning to crumple over. His hands were half lifted involuntarily toward his head. The most horrifying thing about the man was that his throat, above his stiff white collar, was all a red gash. And blood was already coming from it in bright red spurts.

  His throat had been cut!

  His body pitched forward on the glittering metal steps, being brought automatically down to where we stood dumbfounded. At that moment I tried to remember my newspaper training to see everything. But there was nothing else—not near him, above him, or around him.

  He came rolling off the endless treadmill at our feet, immaculately dressed and thoroughly dead.

  Even the blood was beginning to stop pumping out of the slash that had opened his throat from ear to ear.

  Das breathed something in his own language.

  I bent over Sir Quiller.

  “Look!” said Das. He was pointing.

  Pushed up against the body from behind was an open old-fashioned razor. Its keen blade lay polished and gleaming under th
e lights.

  I straightened up. I didn’t touch anything except the emergency button that stopped the escalator.

  “Get the guard at the door,” I said to Rass.

  I didn’t wait to see if he obeyed me or not. I was already running up the stalled steps to the mezzanine.

  I encountered nothing on my way up. At the top, I was in a wide corridor flanked by office doors. Straight ahead of me, about two dozen feet away, was an open door with a light showing through. I ran toward it and looked in.

  Seated at a desk under the glow of neon tubing was Bernice Harper. She was opating a tri-lingual typewriter. Papers were scattered about her as she worked industriously. But you never bothered to look at papers when you saw Bernice Harper.

  Her hair was blonde, light and beautiful, fanning down below her wide clean shoulders. She glanced questioningly up at me with large blue eyes. There was strength in her face, in the large red mouth and in the dimpled chin. But most men looked at her face last. Her body was stronger even than her face. Earthy but never dirty was the way I liked to put it. Yet she disdained plunging necklines. Tonight everything was modestly covered up in a blue taffeta dress that was closed to the frilly throat with platter buttons.

  She was Sir Quiller Selwyn’s personal secretary.

  “Bernice,” I said, slowing down and walking in, “Promise me. No hysterics.”

  “What is it?” She stood up. I couldn’t imagine her having hysterics.

  “It’s Sir Quiller. Gentle, girl. He’s dead.”

  “Dead!” Her face streamed white under the makeup. “He left this office only a minute ago!”

  “Yes. It happened on the escalator.”

  “You mean his heart? But he never complained—”

  “I can’t say for sure just what did happen. I’ve got to find out. Are you the only one up here?”

  “I think—” She paused.

  From the dim corridor outside came a mechanical sound. Spok-spok. Spok-spok.

  We both stared at the door.

  A tall, well-built, youngish fellow walked in with a limp. Every time he moved his left leg you heard the artificial knee-socket. Jack Croydon was one Anzac who had left a leg in Viet Nam while his volunteer company was fighting Cong guerrillas.